Back to 1972 News Articles
The Vancouver Sun Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Saturday, June 24, 1972 - Page 34
It's Dogged Bobby vs. Classic Boris
By Roger Ebert
Chicago (CDN) - Nobody knows very much about him, and the few facts have been repeated time and again. He was born in Chicago, raised in several places but mostly in Brooklyn, learned chess when he was 6.
He lives alone in hotel rooms, relentlessly studying the literature of chess. He has no close friends. He is 29 years old and for a long time now he has been considered the best chess player of all time.
One week from Sunday, in Reykjavik, Iceland, Bobby Fischer will find himself seated across a chess board from a stocky, fierce-looking Russian named Boris Spassky.
This Russian is the chess champion of the world, and it will be Bobby Fischer's mission to reduce the number of Russian chess champions to zero while raising the number in the United States to one.
Bobby could have had a crack at the title several times during the past decade, but at the last moment he always drew back.
He charged that there was a Russian conspiracy to keep the world championship in Soviet hands. Conspiracy or not, no non-Russian has played in a championship match since 1951. There were other things Fischer complained about: The lighting was wrong, the flashbulbs were a nuisance, the crowds in the hall would not keep still.
But mostly he held back from the series of tournaments leading to the world championship because he said the system was loaded in favor of the Russians. At first his objections were dismissed as petulant and unreasonable, because in the world of chess Bobby Fischer is not well-liked.
A U.S. grandmaster once said of him: “We get the greatest chess player in history, and he turns out to be a spoiled boy.” But a fair analysis of the tournament system seemed to indicate that Fischer had a point, and the current world championship is the first played under the reformed rules.
There are other possibilities. One is that Fischer will find the conditions in Iceland not to his liking, and stage another walkout.
This could happen because of Bobby's recent falling-out with Ed Edmundson, who is executive director of the U.S. Chess Federation and has devoted much of the last two years to keeping Bobby happy.
During Fischer's spectacular demolishment of his opposition in the preliminary matches (including his 6-0 wipe-outs of Denmark's Bent Larsen and Russia's Mark Taimanov), it was Edmundson who checked out the playing sites, found the quiet hotel rooms, made sure the fans would not be permitted to bring flash cameras into the hall, and hassled room service for the chicken sandwiches and prize sirloins.
Now Fischer, who finds it difficult to sustain long personal relationships, is back on his own again.
A better possibility, I think, is that Fischer will stay the distance, and that Spassky will collapse from a combination of psychological and chess reasons.
Fischer is a dogged fighter who will defend a lost position to the bitter end, and there is this curious thing about his opponents: They keep caving in to extreme exhaustion.
Tigran Petrosian, the former world champion who was Bobby's opponent in the final challengers match in Buenos Aires, had to check into a hospital at one point.
And Larsen, whose personal dislike for Fischer is no secret, apparently found it psychologically torturing to sit across the board from this arrogant young man who “likes to see 'em squirm.”
Spassky may feel extra pressure because of his deliberate and classically correct playing style. Although Fischer's games have the apparent clearness of a stream of fresh running water, they often have concealed within them Byzantine twists that only Bobby foresees.
Chess is a game of legerdemain: Your opponent can see all of your pieces, and you can see all of his, so you don't conceal pieces but ideas.
A winning chess combination is, at its most basic level, a ruthless demonstration of the logical superiority of your ideas.
And Fischer is able to bury his ideas so deeply into his middle-game positions (or, perhaps, to extract them from their subterranean hiding-places) that a positional player such as Spassky, with his tendency to draw games, might find himself exhausted from forever waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It is Fischer's willingness to take chances, and his ability to extract deep combinations from seemingly shallow positions, that make him a popular favorite in the Soviet Union.
In a country where chess is the national sport, the national passion and, some say, the national soul, there is an impatience with the conservative playing styles of many of the current grandmasters.
While Fischer was mowing down Larsen with an unending flow of innovative chess, the Russians Petrosian and Viktor Korchnoi were bogged down in their quarter-final match with eight drawn games in a row. That is also a record of sorts, but a sterile one.
And so the Russians like Fischer, who is the most popular American in the Soviet Union since Van Cliburn. Maybe they don't like him personally, but they admire his style.
Of the five games they have played previously, Spassky won three and there were two draws. But that doesn't necessarily mean much in terms of their championship match.
Fischer is in the top of his form, and for the past year has played grandmaster-level chess with more success than any other player in the history of the game.
Spassky, however, came in third last summer in a Swiss system tournament in Toronto (where players ranked as equal are played against each other).
First and second places were won by Pal Benko and Robert Byrne, two U.S. grand-masters acknowledged to be Fischer's inferiors.
Earlier, Spassky just managed to take first place by a tie-break in the Canadian Open in Vancouver against much the same kind of opposition.
And in this year's Alekhine memorial tournament in Moscow, Spassky finished in a discouraging tie for sixth and seventh place.
Now he finds himself in Iceland as the sole remaining defender of Russian chess supremacy; recently the Soviet government gave him a larger apartment and a car, and if he wins he will win $78,125 but if he loses he has a great deal more to lose than Fischer.
In the meantime, as the world championship approaches, it is amusing to see the news media gearing up for it.
We have never been quite able to figure out how to cover chess.
It is a sport, but doesn't go into the sports pages. It is a game that millions play, and yet newspapers cannot quite bring themselves to believe that many readers understand chess notation.
Radio and television find it even harder to cover chess, because the printed record of the moves in a game is the only really satisfactory way of presenting it.
The concept of a live radio broadcast of a chess match is mind-boggling, and perhaps only Bob and Ray could handle it (“It's lovely day here in Reykjavik, with sunny skies, and cub scout pack 14 is in the stands for Bobby Fischer recognition day…”).
What will finally happen, I suppose, is that Spassky and Fischer will have their rendezvous with destiny and a lot of people will not understand why it was so momentous.
Chess is a game of the imagination, and its most exciting moments do not happen on the board but in the minds of its players.
When Fischer finally makes his move, that is what we see. But the game's passion is to be found in the secret places of his mind, where he considers all of the possible moves on the board, and rejects them, all but one.
That moment of decision is private, and only a chess player can fully understand it.
